No End in Sight
Directed by Charles Ferguson
The Devil Came on Horseback
Directed by Ricki Stern & Anne Sundberg
Charles Ferguson directs No End in Sight, a grave retelling of the Bush Administration’s messy tactics during the beginning of the latest Iraq invasion, less as a virulent anti-war treatise than as a convincing portrait of mismanagement. In an odd way, this is a relief. It arrives on a fiery trail paved by the recent bombardment of Iraq War documentaries, each of which has viciously reviewed the shabby war-is-hell tract with relentless footage of U.S. troops gone wild in the Middle East. The bloated line-up of titles—Fahrenheit 9/11, Gunner Palace, The War Tapes—contain such uniformity in their criticism that they’ve developed into a genre of their own (artistic rendering of Iraqi struggles, such as James Longley’s magnificent Iraq in Fragments, belong to a separate category of investigation). Ferguson’s inquiry into the war doesn’t spend much time on the ground, but it features a tense round-up of talking heads and finds an effective weapon in their shared tone of frustration.
Beginning with Donald Rumsfeld’s dubious assertion that the invasion formed “the first war of the 21st century,” No End in Sight solidifies its prologue through the memories of a former strategic policy director for the Iraq war, looking back on the September 11, 2001, attack on the Pentagon: “This was something Osama bin Laden had to have coordinated,” the downtrodden official, Col. Paul Hughes, recalls. “So you had that thought immediately?” Ferguson shoots back, off-camera. The colonel remains firm: “Immediately.” But Hughes and several other government employees soon found themselves tasked with the dubious goal of drawing connections between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s leadership in Iraq, creating the first step in a modus operandi that culminated with the invasion in late 2003. Says one employee, considering the backwards logic in hindsight: “I don’t know what they were smoking, but it must be very good.”
After gathering testimony in regard to the invasion, Ferguson uses the same voices to discuss the chaotic fallout. As looting ravages the streets of Baghdad, and Rumsfeld jovially mocks the damage reports (“Henny-penny, the sky is falling”), Coalition Provisional Authority leader L. Paul Bremmer adds definite insult to injury in the supposed reconstruction process. His catastrophic decrees, including an all-inclusive “De-Ba’athification” and disbandment of the Iraqi military, further cripple a bleeding nation. These irrevocably deleterious procedures have been largely ignored by other documentaries that tread on similar ground. Ferguson’s filmmaking is comparatively dense, but utterly cohesive. Despite suffering from a long list of officials that refused to appear on camera, his direction forcefully remains on topic. His dedication to consistency is a reminder that one outcome even worse than misinformation is no information at all. “Time passed,” sighs a government agent, “and we didn’t see any photos.”
The same underlying message beats with a heavy rhythm throughout The Devil Came on Horseback, a comprehensive overview of the United States’ blind-eye treatment of the genocide in Darfur in the face of definitive evidence provided by one of its own. Directors Ricki Stern and Anne Sundberg combine intense storytelling maneuvers and the singularly powerful conviction of their central subject to create an engaging and unforgettable document of neglect. It’s the tragic tale of a one-man army against the world: U.S. marine Brian Steidl finds himself assigned to the Sudan region in question with the dubious job of overseeing a ceasefire between warring factions. Unarmed but equipped with a camera, he clicks away as the Arab rulership begins to systematically (and brutally) eliminate the African natives. Save for New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, Steidl initially finds few sympathetic members of the media interested in helping spread the awareness of the horrors he’s witnessed.
Following Steidl on his noble fight to save a fraught race, the movie exhibits an immersive pace and an instantly relatable level of humanity rarely seen in the notoriously dry realm of global analysis. Sincere and purposeful, Devil has the potential to do for the situation in Darfur what An Inconvenient Truth did for global warming, which is to say, get people talking about it.
